Sarah Sze

With all the extra time on our hands during the slow months, we can finally check out a few works everybody’s been talking about. The legendary Sarah Sze-Venice Biennale Pavillion comes to the Bronx; a Ryan McNamara performance comes to the High Line; and Internet artists come to Spectacle Theater.

Hedge fund managers manipulate the art market. This WSJ article does a reasonable job of informing readers on who the key players are, but doesn’t release the kind of juicy issues former art market journalist Sarah Thornton was known for reporting. Read the WSJ article and then Art Market Monitor for analysis. [Art Market Monitor]

Vik Muniz, Chuck Close, Sarah Sze and Jean Shin have been commissioned by the MTA to beautify the 2nd Ave subway. No Vik Muniz rendering has been released but we’re unhappy with him regardless since he’s been making bad work since forever. We’re also unsure that Chuck Close was the right man for this commission. Who wants to look at a giant anonymous baby head during their commute? [In the Air]

The reviews for the Guggenheim’s Carrie Mae Weems show (opening today) have begun to roll in. Holland Cotter is upset the show wasn’t larger, and half heartedly gives curators Kathryn E. Delmez at the Frist Center and Jennifer Blessing and Susan Thompson at the Guggenheim a pat on the back for doing a good job working within the restrictions. [The New York Times]

Claudia LaRocco on the weeklong experience of APAP: Mild. I very much appreciated the observation that the pop song is still an ironic or at least knowing structural device in dance. [ArtForum]

The Kiev Biennial will take place for a second time. Really? This is not a city of great stability at the moment. The launch of any exhibition of that size there will be daunting task for curators and artists. [The Art Newspaper]

The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) presents new work by Artist-in-Residence Sarah Sze. Celebrate her first solo exhibition in the Philadelphia area on Friday, December 13th with an artist lecture at 5:30PM and reception until 8PM. This show, on view through April 6, 2014, will culminate with a publication.

Two weeks ago we flew out to Toronto to check out Art Toronto and the city’s gallery scene. Two totally different worlds. While the fair suffers from a lack of ambition, the gallery shows we saw presented a more balanced picture of the city as a whole. It’s not perfect, but at the very least we managed to take in some work by a few of the Venice Biennale’s better artists.

Did you beach too hard and forget to read this summer? Fear not, art lovers, for we bring you the second annual AFC Best of Summer list. We’ve brought together the blog’s greatest summer hits from staff and contributors, because, let’s face it, you might have missed out on days or weeks of AFC when you were traveling to Venice, Basel, or closer to home, the Rockaways. We’ve published some great artist essays with our STUFF series, started our “Diary of a Mad Gallery Owner” series, and continued to bring you reviews and opinion pieces. Enjoy.

Good God we were busy yesterday. We spent the day posting images from the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection as part of “A Day for Detroit”, a co-ordinated blog effort designed to raise awareness about what could be lost were the collection to be sold. This effort was spearheaded by Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green and was done in collaboration with approximately 20 other art blogs, who did the same on their sites, as well as some of Detroit’s professional art community. We asked artists, curators and dealers who either once lived in Detroit or live there now to name their favorite works from the DIA and to share their stories.

Welcome to A Day for Detroit. For Art F City’s contribution to A Day for Detroit, we asked a robust swath of art worlders who have lived or are currently living in Detroit about their favorite works in the DIA’s collection. Their images and commentary will appear on the blog throughout the day.

I have lukewarm feelings on this year’s Venice Biennale, which contains two distinct exhibitions: The Encyclopedic Palace, a 1,000-artwork-plus exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni, and dozens of national, pavilion-based exhibitions organized by curators from each country. Despite the slightly confusing fact that the theme of the Biennale as a whole is The Encyclopedic Palace, historically, the two exhibitions don’t have much overlap. But something different happened this year.

Last week we spent hundreds of hours looking at art at the Venice Biennale. We saw a lot of art. It’s a sprawling affair, that invites hundreds of countries to exhibit their nation’s best artwork.

We have a lot to talk about, so without any further ado, here’s part one of our Giardini slideshow with commentary. It features pavilions by Russia, Great Britain, Switzerland, Venezuela, Greece, Poland, Serbia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, the United States, and Canada. Look for part two later today.